Amanda Jones’s story is awful – and important. A school librarian for 23 years in her home town of Watson, southern Louisiana, she has watched with concern in recent years as a movement of book-banning swept across the US. According to the American Library Association, “book challenges” in public libraries almost doubled from 729 in 2021 to 1,269 in 2022.
In July 2022, when Jones heard about a public meeting that would discuss “book content” in local libraries, she went along. A board member said she was “concerned” about some “inappropriate” material in the local library’s children and young adult sections. In response, Jones gave a measured speech, explaining her belief that “while book challenges are often done with the best intentions, and in the name of age appropriateness, they often target marginalised communities” and “books on sexual health and reproduction”. She went on to detail the “First Amendment right to borrow, read, view, and listen to library resources”.
“I said nothing earth-shattering,” Jones writes in her memoir. But within days her life had been upended because of two posts on social media. The first was by the Facebook page of Citizens for a New Louisiana, a far-right group whom Jones knew had worked to defund a library in nearby Lafayette and whose executive director was a man named Michael Lunsford. It accused Jones of “fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section”. The second Facebook post was made by local man Ryan Thames, who wrote that Jones advocated “teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds”.
The posts were shared widely by local people, including many Jones knew. “One parent in particular whose child I had helped with getting services for a learning disability was especially vicious,” she writes, devastatingly. Later, she received a death threat. Over the course of the next year, Jones, who is in her mid-40s, lost a lot of weight, experienced hair loss and took medical leave from work. In the spring of 2023 she sued Lunsford and Thames for defamation.
That Librarian is Jones’s account of the 2022 public meeting that started her ordeal, the ultimately unsuccessful court case and all that followed. She has a lively, convivial style: “I worried that my friends and family would be targeted next. Spoiler alert: they were.” Sometimes this breeziness veers into pettiness, as when she describes an opponent who has “the spelling and grammar of a child of 10”, or refers to Valarie Hodges, a member of the Louisiana state senate who posted online against Jones, as “my gal pal Val”.
The more wistful sections are warming. Jones describes how she was in high school when Watson had its first traffic light installed – that’s how small a town it is. She credits her teenage reading of Judy Blume, one of the most banned authors ever, with “making me more empathetic”. Jones believes uncompromisingly in the power of books to open minds. And through working as a school librarian, has seen the impact of exclusion politics: “I have lost more former students to suicide than I care to think about, many of whom, I suspect, died as a direct result of being made to feel excluded in our society.” Together, these experiences have informed her anti-censorship mentality.
But she knows party politics comes into it too. Her local area has become “extremely alt-right and conspiratorial” in recent years, and she has noticed that “all book banners seem to be Republican”. She is refreshingly honest about her relative complicity. “It wasn’t until I was into my 40s that I realised some aspects of our country weren’t that great,” she writes, before admitting that she voted for Donald Trump in 2016. She regrets it now, but these admissions are important. Listening to voices from across the political divide, and understanding the ways in which we are both similar and different to those who vote similarly and differently to us is crucial in understanding why the world is the way it is – even more so after Trump’s re-election.
Several times, Jones refers to how she has tracked her defamers to see they have also donated to election campaigns of particular pro-ban politicians. But she never fully examines the intricacies of this likely organised overlap, or takes a step back to consider how this current wave of book banning compares with historical cases. As such, “my fight against book banning in America” would be a more suitable subtitle, not “the fight”. This is a brave, fascinating book, but it’s the personal story of Jones’s ordeal – about which she is evidently still very bitter – rather than an account of the movement as a whole.
• That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones is published by Bloomsbury (£24). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
